a chance to see that care in the community means more than simply leaving psychiatric cases to fend for themselves. Charlie, you and Flo take the boy. Jane, I’ll need your help with the girl.’
He was going to need his skill a whole lot more, she thought when she helped the paramedic wheel the girl into cubicle 2.
The teenager was a mess. Countless lacerations to her face and arms, compound fractures to the right and left tibia and fibula which would require the services of both orthopaedics and plastics, but it was her laboured, rasping breathing that was the most worrying. If she wasn’t helped—and quickly—not enough oxygen would reach her brain and she’d be in big trouble.
‘ET, Jane,’ Elliot demanded, though in fact there had been no need for him to ask. She was already holding the correct size of endotracheal tube out to him, and gently he eased it past the girl’s vocal cords and down into her trachea. ‘IV lines and BP?’
‘IV’s open and running,’ she replied, checking the drip bags containing the saline solution which was providing a temporary substitute for the blood the teenager was losing. ‘BP 60 over 40.’
Elliot frowned. Too low, much too low, and the girl’s heartbeat was showing an increasingly uneven rhythm.
Quickly he placed his stethoscope on the injured girl’s chest. There were no breath sounds on the left side. She must have been thrown against one of the front seats in the crash and her left lung had collapsed, sending blood and air seeping into her chest cavity.
‘Chest drain and scalpel?’ Jane murmured.
He nodded and swiftly made an incision into the upper right-hand side of the teenager’s chest, then carefully inserted a plastic tube directly into her chest cavity. ‘BP now?’
‘Eighty over sixty,’ Jane answered.
Better. Not great, but definitely better. The chest drain had suctioned the excess air and blood out of the girl’s chest. She was starting to stabilise at last.
‘You’ll be wanting six units of O-negative blood, chest, arm and leg X-rays?’ Jane asked.
Elliot’s eyebrows lifted and he grinned. ‘This is getting seriously worrying.’
‘Worrying?’ she repeated in confusion.
‘Your apparent ability to read my mind.’
Just so long as you can’t read mine, she thought, and smiled. ‘It comes with working with you for two years.’
He was surprised. ‘Has it really been that long?’
‘Uh-huh.’
He supposed it must have been, but Jane…Well, Jane just always seemed to have been there. Skilled, intuitive, able to instinctively predict whatever he needed whenever he needed it.
But even she couldn’t get him out of his current predicament, he thought, watching her as she inserted another IV line to take the O-negative blood they would use until they’d made a cross-match. Nobody could.
If his mother hadn’t just left for Canada to stay with his sister Annie for the next three months to help her through what was proving to be a particularly difficult first pregnancy, she would have taken Nicole like a shot—he knew she would. Or if the agencies he’d phoned could have provided him with a nanny or a housekeeper immediately, but none of them could supply anybody until the beginning of April, and that was a month away.
Which meant that not only was he up the creek without a paddle, he was sitting in a leaking boat as well.
How could Donna have done this to him? She’d known the hours he worked, that everything could alter in an instant if a bad accident like this came in. What had she expected him to do with Nicole, then? And what about after school, at weekends?
It probably hadn’t even occurred to her, he decided bitterly. Live for today—that had always been Donna’s motto. Live for today, and don’t think about tomorrow.
Which was what attracted you to her in the first place, his mind pointed out. Her vitality, her lust for life, not to mention a husky French accent and a face and figure that had done irreparable damage to his libido.
But it hadn’t lasted. Within three short years the marriage had been over, leaving him bitter and disillusioned. And now Donna was dead, killed in a car crash. And he had a daughter arriving tomorrow and no earthly idea of how he was going to cope.
‘Elliot, are you quite sure you’re OK?’ Jane said, her gaze fixed on him with concern when the teenager was wheeled out of the treatment room towards the theatre after Radiology had confirmed that the patient did, indeed, have compound fractures, but no other major damage. ‘You seem a bit, well, a bit preoccupied this afternoon.’
‘Perils of being a new and very inexperienced special reg,’ he replied, managing to dredge up a smile. ‘Too much to think about.’
She didn’t press the point, though he knew she wasn’t convinced, and with relief he strode quickly down the treatment room to check on the other casualties. He didn’t want to talk about his problem—didn’t even want to think about it. All he wanted to do right now was to bury himself in work and forget all about his daughter, and he managed to do just that until late in the afternoon when the sound of children crying caught his attention.
‘What on earth’s going on in cubicle 8, Flo?’ he asked curiously. ‘It sounds like somebody’s being murdered in there.’
She sighed. ‘It’s a case of child neglect. Two girls and a boy, aged between one and four. The police brought them in ten minutes ago for a medical assessment before they contact Social Services. Apparently their dad’s in jail, their mother is God knows where and a neighbour phoned the police because she hadn’t seen them out and about for a week.’
‘Medical condition?’ Elliot demanded, his professional instincts immediately alert.
‘Excellent, considering they’ve been living in an unheated flat for the past week, and the oldest child told the police they haven’t had anything to eat for two days.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Honestly, some people should never have children.’
People like him, Elliot decided, but it was too late to think about that now, too late to regret that night in the hotel in Paris. ‘Who’s with them?’
‘Jane. Charlie’s checked them over, and there’s nothing we can do for them except clean them up and give them some food, but…’ She shrugged. ‘It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?’
He supposed it was as he strode into the cubicle to find Jane sitting on the trolley, holding the youngest of the three children in her arms while the other two clung to her, wide-eyed and clearly terrified.
‘Need any help?’ he asked.
She shook her head and smiled, apparently completely oblivious to the overpowering smell of dried urine and faeces emanating from the trio. ‘No, thanks. I’ve sent down to the kitchens for some food, and Kelly’s organising a bath for them all.’
‘What about clean clothes?’ he suggested.
‘Flo’s phoned her husband and he’s bringing some of their twins’ old
